New DevelopmentsAnemone MossChapter One:This Builds the FutureShe exists again, hovering in the dry autumn air of the parking structure outside a Target—no, not floating, being lifted, by four strong arms, two on either side of her, while a third person in a dirty bck ski-mask holds a fluttering sheet of paper and on it a strange pattern of lines and dots. That symbol is her first impression. She is compelled backward, like falling, into the cushioned seat of a van smelling of new pstic and weed resin and then the two masked individuals at her sides hold her down, tightly although she’s not struggling, and the door slides shut and she can feel the van’s acceleration, watch the beige storefronts of the mall slip away into anonymous suburban developments.

  “Did it work?” someone is asking.

  “I think so. She went sck.” A masked face turns to her. “Hey, are you in there?”

  “I think so,” she says, mimicking. “I think I’m in here. Why—why is it the middle of the day?”

  The person in front of her has piercing brown eyes and thick eyebrows. “What’s the st thing you remember?”

  “Uh… a fshlight. A man—no, someone with a fshlight, approaching me. There’s a semi in front… of the… sorry.”

  “Tell me more,” says the piercing eyes, like the eyes of a hawk. “Trust me, it’ll help with the process.”

  ***

  Most of the people in her DnD group had struggled with the idea that she was a gay man, so she had no clue how to break it to them that she was, as her roommate said, Gay Deluxe. The only person who even knew a term like ‘transgender’ was the balding old bear Darren who had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 90s up until the dotcom bubble burst a few years ago and he’d retired eastward. Darren was the one who had pointed out that people would be about as comfortable with a drag queen as they had been with a swishy twink, so one day she just showed up in makeup, a skirt, a bra, and a camisole, trying to channel some sort of Paris Hilton energy. Josh, who already thought he was was too good for the group because he had spent sophomore year on the high school football team, tried to make a big deal out of it and threatened to leave. He never did. He still called her a pervert, a faggot, and worse things, but they were able to continue the sessions with only occasional interruptions for jokes at her expense. Perhaps it was the fact that Darren weighed nearly twice as much as Josh, and that a good portion of that was muscle, and that every time Josh was too pushy with her Darren gave a look with clear implications.

  And Darren had been right: in short order, people were fine with her wearing skirts and dresses. People got used to it. Sometimes they were hostile, but mostly they seem to regard her as simply a freak, a mascot even. A bit of local color.

  All this worked to bring her and Darren significantly closer, and tely they’ve been hanging out a lot. They both need friends, people they can trust, despite the age gap. She knows how it must look to her roommate, to her DnD friends, hell, to the whole town: an older gay man who looks like a grizzled biker and a young effeminate crossdresser. She also knows some things they would never understand: she’s actually a woman and he is happily in a committed, albeit secret, retionship with a gym manager named Liam who everyone else in town thinks is straight. She met Liam a few weeks ago, at Darren’s house, and saw a completely different side of him. Normally he’s loud and commanding—she’s met him several times in town. This time he was quieter, mild-mannered, soft and delicate in his motions. Clearly struggling with her presence in his private space but Darren had expined to her that Liam had never been himself except with romantic partners. He had only been out to himself for a few years whereas Darren had been for over a decade. Liam was polite to her, even if just for his partner’s sake.

  The practical problem is that it’s not so easy to just pleasantly be friends in a town like this. She’s fgrant as a middle finger, increasingly furious with every doe-eyed waitress and fake-friendly churchgoing store clerk for what they’ve put her through her whole life, but he has a future that he thinks of, in this town, and he doesn’t want to draw down any unusual ire. They both have cars—a necessity to navigate this spread-out pce—and sometimes they’ll meet up at malls several towns over, a few times having been asked to leave by friendly but firm security guards who are ‘just looking out for the children’.

  It’s something to do, something that keeps them away from the trouble they might meet too close to home. The coffee and chocote of a Starbucks mocha or the creamy icing at Cinnabon might perk up her dopamine levels but what’s fun are the interstitial spaces. The nearest mall was subject a while back to a fire. In local news it had been initially beled a potential terrorist incident and for a few hours everyone had been full of specution over what some unknown Middle Eastern group had found so objectionable in a pleasant small-town mall. Through that day the ever-repeated aphorism of the era circuted: “They hate our way of life.” In the evening news it was confirmed that the fire had been the result of a problem with the electrical system. Months ter a committee found it had been, more precisely, the result of a failure to uphold scheduled maintenance, a loosening of regutions, and a poor workpce safety culture more concerned with profits than care for the mall’s employees and patrons. No one had died and nothing was changed but in the process of building the mall back a subterranean area of various burned out walkways and cell-like storefronts had been simply buried beneath a new ADA-compliant walkway to and from the expanded concrete parking structure. There are, however, access points, and for the moment they are unmonitored by mall security.

  The seared crust of what is basically a mirror image of the well-lit mall above them has nothing particurly exciting except its very off-limits character. The thrill of a Starbucks cannot compare to the thrill of illegally being where she should not, in the strange paths beneath the stores, a little hidden cave system of dusty concrete, increasingly dated advertisements, and crumbling pster. Even a mundane secret is still a secret, feeding some part of her that wants to tear away at the beige illusion. At her insistence, they make repeated adventures into the hidden world. There’s some graffiti but not much and only a couple small piles of used needles—no one has yet taken up residence. In the corner of one store they find piles of merchandise, some cheap jewelry and knockoff purses in a garbage bag. Another has a row of left high heels. In one a single watch had been left on a counter-top. A maintenance closet is found, the lock violently broken, and inside a mop and bucket grown fuzzy with mold, and all the cleaning chemicals neatly arranged. From nearby Darren finds an entrance to a series of conference rooms that had presumably never been public. In one, on the side of what had once been a polished table, sits a single mani envelope. The contents are bck-and-white aerial photographs of the surrounding towns, a number of locations marked with small red arrows. “Those look like spypne photos,” Darren says. “From the Cold War.”

  “They’re current,” she remarks, noticing a Taco Bell that had been built only a few months ago, after the mall’s reconstruction. These sorts of chain stores and fast food pces have been popping up with increasing frequency. Local cafes and restaurants vanishing. And around the edges of the town, nd is being cleared for new byrinthine suburbs, growing off the highway. It’s been getting more traffic every year, mostly eighteen-wheelers. A hub for something is emerging—finance, telecom, logistics. The state and county have adopted tax codes lenient toward that sort of thing. In the next town further west, industrial parks appear, full of warehouses and office buildings.

  Darren was involved in some sort of military action in Iraq during Bush Sr’s presidency. He rarely talks about it. After they steamrolled through burning oilfields he came home and got into the civilian sector, using his tech skills in Silicon Valley until the company he was with vanished like a smoke ring and he nded here, also drawn by the growing commerce hub. At some point he acquired a penchant for pacifism and occasionally he’ll break into long rants about the pointlessness of invading Iraq again. She had been somewhat on the fence but he managed to convince her from his experiences of the previous war in Iraq that there was neither a link to 9/11 nor a particur threat toward America. Still, she points out, Hussein is doing war crimes. He’s using chemical weapons on his own people.

  “He’s using chemical weapons on the Kurds, and if we bomb him someone else is going to be attacking the Kurds. It’s ethnic cleansing. You can’t stop that kind of hatred by escating the violence.”

  “What do you wanna do, march in there with peace signs and weed and kumbaya?”

  He smirks. “Things are infinitely more complicated than that, kiddo. Personally I want to know what would happen if we could get everyone in there a voice. You’ve probably never heard the opinion of a single person living in Iraq, Kurdish or otherwise, have you?”

  “No.”

  “So how are you qualified to say where they need bombs dropped?”

  “So you think that if everyone there had a voice we’d be able to figure out what to do?”

  “Probably. At least a little better.”

  “Consider this: everyone here has a voice and most of them think you’re a creepy old man and I’m a perverted crossdressing freak.”

  He stares into the middle distance for a long time, like he does sometimes, not talking, gears turning in his head. Finally he says, “Alright, touche.” He thinks for another minute. “On the other hand, would you trust W Bush’s opinion of you and I?”

  She ughs. “Alright, touche.”

  ***

  The van peels off to a stop alongside a desote valley road, nothing around but golden fields of dry grass, a pile of abandoned wheels, and a television that’s been used for target practice. The others in the van get out and gesture for her to do likewise. The driver walks off a couple dozen feet and starts smoking a menthol. The one who had been holding up the paper with the symbol on it, a nky androgynous individual with brown skin and long bck hair, speaks to her with a deep voice both silky and gravelly. “We have to check you for listening devices and tracking devices. It’s going to be a little uncomfortable. I can do it or if you prefer they can.” Gesturing to the blond person with the thick eyebrows.

  “Uh, I guess, I’d prefer she does.”

  “They, not she,” corrects the blond as they move in front of her. She’s wearing a professional white blouse with a women’s sports coat and gray scks, and the clothes all ftten as the blond pats her down. From the pocket of the coat they pull out a Bckberry cell phone.

  “I don’t remember that phone,” she says. “I don’t remember having it.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I destroy it,” says the tall one, grabbing it out of the blond’s outstretched hand and throwing it down into the gravel. They produce a hammer and in a couple quick swings the phone is smashed, sending up a cloud of gray dust.

  The blond’s hands move down to her hips.

  “Uh,” she speaks up, filling with anxiety and embarrassment. “You might find—I mean um, I’m a mal—”

  “I know you’re a transsexual,” the blond says. Pats down her inner thighs and crotch. It feels strange. “Besides, you’ve had the surgery.” Stops for a moment. Their hawklike eyes meet hers. “Did you know that?”

  “No…” she mumbles. Must be tucking. “Wait, I—what?” She’s had her hands up like she was under arrest but out of instinct she grabs at her crotch and cups a vulva. That’s not right. “What? How?”

  “What year is it?” asks the blond.

  “2003,” she says. “Wait…” Something foggy in her brain speaks up, trying to sort out the muddle of confusion with growing anxiety. “No, it’s not, is it? It’s… 2006?”

  “7,” says the blond.

  “How could I forget four years?” she asks. Neither the blond or the tall one say anything. She realizes their all-bck outfits are pretty shabby, perhaps thrift store finds. They’re acting practiced but not professional. The blond finishes patting down her scks. “Take your shoes off,” they say.

  She does and the blond hands them to the tall one, who throws them off into the field. The tall one grabs a pair of fts out of the passenger side of the front. “See if these fit.”

  She slips them on. “Yeah, they’re my size.” The tall one smirks and the blond shrugs, as if they’ve had a previous conversation about this. The blond pulls something out of their pocket. “Put this on.”

  It’s a silky bck pillowcase. “What?”

  “Cover your head. It’s for our protection.”

  ***

  There’s an undeniable pleasure to the crime of trespassing, amplified by the ways that the world has cut her out of it. It feels like she’s cutting back into it, weaving through the spaces that she’s not supposed to be in for whatever arbitrary reason, property or propriety. She takes to lockpicking easily and quickly, the meticulous details giving her something to focus on, something she runs through in her mind again and again while she’s taking orders at the takeout window or wrapping a burger in waxpaper. Dissociating at work is important, a pce where she has to dress like a boy and use a deeper voice and carry out repetitive tasks simply. She’s always had a strong visual memory and now different locking mechanisms live permanently in her brain, a series of interlinking parts. Locks are a microcosm of society, a desperate bance between the desire to keep people out and the necessity of making things simple for the average consumer. Many locks can be gotten around with just the slip of an old credit card through the crack. She starts carrying around tex gloves and a special wig she uses only for the night escapades.

  Initially she’s just going with Darren to abandoned commercial settings but soon she’s exploring by herself. She likes breaking into churches. The simple sheep of the flock could not imagine the vitriol they’ve earned from her over a lifetime of abuse. At night, she takes back the spaces they made theirs. She could desecrate the pce and it feels tempting to do something truly outrageous—masturbate at the altar, piss on the cross. Something to remind these little, violent people with their little, violent concerns that their God is made of wood and pster and pstic like everything else in this town. She usually just makes little arrangements—moves the bible to a different table, collects all the prayer books in one corner. Maybe the churchgoers will think they’re being haunted. Almost accurate. In one church she finds a collection of tracts against abortion and these she takes and ter throws into a ditch beside the highway onramp. In an argument at school one of several people she considered her nemesis had said, “How would you feel if you had been aborted?” to which she had replied, “A lot happier!”

  She had moved out of her aunt’s home only a few months after turning eighteen. One of the advantages of living in the middle of nowhere is that the rent is pretty low and she can mostly pay for it with her job at McDonald’s. Technically she’s splitting the rent with someone she’s known since elementary school, a stoner mechanic named Dougs, but he’s almost never home. He sees her in a skirt and makeup and says nothing, which she’s thankful for. He’s quiet and mumbles like Ozzy Osbourne and she has the feeling he doesn’t give much of a fuck what other people get up to as long as they cause him no difficulties. This has not only been a blessing as a transvestite going on transgender, but also as a developing serial trespasser.

  Her mother doesn’t talk to her anymore. Things had been miserable for a long time, the st few months she lived in her childhood home filled with rants about AIDS and Jesus and the like, until one day a few months ago she rounded a corner while in full female appearance and there her mother was, walking right toward her. Such a vicious arrangement of emotions and expressions passed through her mother’s face it looked like demonic possession and then her mother cast down her eyes and swiftly walked right past. No words spoken by either party. Since then, her mother hasn’t called, and she hasn’t called her mother. The silence hangs in the air for her over this shitty little town like the winter fog that comes in at sunset and only fuels her desire to see this town suffer, to see it destroyed, erased from existence. Her mother is well-liked here.

  She breaks into her mother’s workpce, a travel agency, but there is no trace of her in her mother’s desk drawers. She steals all the pens and pencils and the stack of her mother’s business cards. The pens and pencils she smashes with a rock into a pile of pstic and wooden splinters. The business cards she burns.

  Darren doesn’t know that she’s been breaking into actively used pces of business, she only goes to abandoned pces with him. She thinks he feels the need to look after her, a need that compels him to go along with her transgressions. The occasional allusions to a past he’s trying to recapture make her feel less guilty about pushing those limits. This connection is strained by her anger at the world and his dual allegiances. The desperate loneliness they both feel keeps it strong enough to endure their mutual frustrations.

  A few months ter she and Darren are exploring an abandoned office building by the highway. While there, in a conference room in the middle of the building, they find another mani envelope with aerial photographs of all the nearby towns. Only a few buildings are indicated with red arrows this time, and she recognizes some of them as being among those marked on the previous maps. They’re mostly innocuous office buildings, like the one they’re in now except still in use. One location is marked with a rge green arrow. It’s a warehouse, he recalls, shipping and receiving, pced weirdly in a commercially zoned area downtown (if you can call two streets of old-timey storefronts ‘downtown’). It’s been empty every time he passes by it. She knows the spot, she’s just never thought about it. She’s walked past it dozens of times. It’s just not the kind of pce you pay attention to.

  “Let’s go there,” she says. “I’m curious. This is the second one of these we’ve found. I think it’s like a game or something.”

  “It’s too risky. Downtown, still open for business. Might have security, might have an arm system.”

  “Come on, we’ve gotten really good at this. And whatever this is it seems like they want us to go there.”

  “You don’t know what this is and there’s no reason to think we were meant to find it at all.”

  “It’ll be fine, we’ll be safe. We’ll dress normally, casually, with disguises. If I can’t crack the lock in a few minutes we’ll give up. I wanna try, this seems like an adventure.”

  He sighs. She’s gotten good at this. “Alright, but if anything weird happens, any risk of anything, we’re getting out of there, and I told you so.”

  “If nothing weird happens, I told you so.”

  ***

  The van stops and she is led onto some grass then concrete then dirt. When the pillowcase is removed she finds herself in the backyard of a two-story that looks like it was built in the te 1800s, sloppily refurbished in the 70s, and then subject to many successive decorating revisions by artistically-inclined punks. Potted pnts, patio tables with ashtrays, scattered beer cans, pstic chairs, gathered beneath walls decorated with wood carvings of tree people, rusty metal objects aesthetically welded together, and faded flowers painted on the wood paneling. Stickers and graffiti tags yered over everything. Cozy, heavily lived-in. She reels forward and vomits into some nasturtiums. “Sorry,” she says. “Sorry.” Then she pukes again, and again.

  “Having your head covered?” asks the tall one. “Sometimes it can make people pretty carsick. I should have warned you.”

  “No, it’s not that,” she says, and retches some more. Stomach empty, just bile. “Years. Four years. Surgery. I can’t remember any of it. And I feel like my brain’s just been… just, shut off. The whole time.”

  She can feel the three of them watching her.

  “Do you drink?” asks the blond.

  “I don’t know!” she screams suddenly. “I don’t know what I do! I don’t even know what I look like anymore!”

  “Let’s just calm down, you can take your time. You want a beer?”

  “Water for starters,” she croaks. “Then, yes, a beer. A cigarette too. I don’t know if I smoke but I’m gonna have one right now. For fuck’s sake. Okay.”

  She’s stable now, and she can kinda stand up. The tall one is already gone and returns a moment ter with a rag and a gss of water. She cleans her face off, rinses her mouth out. The one who had been driving the van hoses down the pnts and the stone tiles to wash the vomit away.

  “Hey,” says the blond, “can she get a cigarette?”

  “Yeah, sure,” the driver says, and casually hands her one with a lighter.

  She fumbles a little but remembers how to use it, so maybe she does smoke. Maybe she started smoking. Immediately when the nicotine hits her lungs she feels a wave of calm wash over her body. She can deal with whatever this is, with whatever comes, it’s fine.

  The lighter has a little painting on it, feels like it might have been done with nail polish. Hand-painted. A cat skull, flowers around it.

  “It’s 2007,” she says. “What’s going on in 2007?”

  “Not much,” says the blond. “People are talking on the internet. Cell phones have more features. Bush is still president, we’re still at war in Iraq. Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face, then made him apologize.”

  “The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess,” she says. The blond and the tall one exchange a look that she can’t read.

  The blond one hands her a beer. “Alright,” they say, “if you’re ready to continue, I wanna hear what else you remember. But first, your name.”

  “You don’t know my name?” she asks.

  “It’s complicated,” says the blond one.

  “Lilith,” she says. “Lilly.”

  The blond and the tall one exchange a look.

  “Alright, Lilly,” says the blond one.

  “Wait,” she says. “I don’t know your name.”

  “I’m Scatter,” says the tall one.

  “I’m Houndstooth,” says the blond one.

  “Those don’t sound like real names,” she says.

  “There are no real names, honey,” says Scatter.

  “Continue,” says Houndstooth.

  ***

  Most stores, shops, and pces of business other than family restaurants close by nightfall, so she reasons with Darren that they’ll be fine if they get started around ten. Since it’s the beginning of April that’s well after nightfall but early enough that if they need to abort the mission they can just cim they were heading home from a te meal. She’s already scoped out the pce. Five nights in a row it was empty after dark, regur employees leaving at five PM. It’s only two men and a woman, perfectly mundane looking middle aged white people in casual professional clothes, the sort of person she’s passed a thousand times without noticing. On the street side is a three story building, brutalist concrete and a gss door that says simply ‘Michigan Shipping Receiving and Holding’ in white lettering. They live far from Michigan. On the backside, in the employee parking lot shared by an antique store and a cafe that’s only ever open from seven AM to noon, there’s two loading docks big enough that a semi could back up to them. The building as a whole is rge and amorphous in between the quaint shops on either side. It seems as though a wide empty lot were taken over and filled with concrete and gss.

  There’s an employee access door next to the loading docks. Darren leans against the wall and pretends to be talking with her while Lilly fiddles with the lock. It’s a little tricky, the pins sticking, taking longer than it normally does. The cool night air distracting her as she tries to visualize what must be happening inside the lock, the arrangement of six pins, two and four in disagreement with her. A serrated pin on four. Darren’s getting nervous and she knows he wants to call it off. Finally, the fourth pin snaps into pce, and with a little pressure the lock turns and the door slides smoothly open. No arm sounds. She smirks and Darren shrugs in response. The two of them slip inside and she re-locks the door behind.

  And inside…

  ***

  Darkness, gss and cement, papers, nodes, pns, fate, a slipping cascade of time, the droning hum of the weight of the thing erupting from all that rock and sky and the straight lines smooth between them a geometric temple, a mausoleum for the human animal, a nursery for the successor. A half dozen billion cataleptic bodies performing a pageant for the unseen force screwing them into pce.

  ***

  Years ter she is coming down.

  It’s 2013 and she is driving through the streets of San Francisco bsting Crystal Castles, reflected off the new gss facades of the financial district and the aging faces of rich white gay men in the Castro. She is dating a white man from out of town with uneven facial hair like the weeds in an empty lot, who likes wearing bright Hawaiian shirts and leather jackets. There is no future in him. A sinister energy hangs in the predawn air as the ketamine wears off and the xanax kicks in. That evening she is down at the water’s edge watching a leviathan container ship rolling up the bay. As the sun sinks behind the fog she thinks she sees someone jump from the ship into the water, but there’s no way to be sure. The man behind her, the hipster who her clothes smell like, is clutching vintage James Brown vinyls and an anime DVD and he’s crying. She asks what’s wrong and he says everything is so beautiful. She exhausts herself giving a space for him to talk about himself and when the molly wears off his expression is bnk and ft like a freshly poured concrete sidewalk.

  At three a.m. at Denny’s he says he clocked her before they started dating but he didn’t know she was post-op. Whenever he’s nervous he rubs a tattoo of a jukebox with a mustache that covers old scars on his wrist. He has sweet, pure, empty eyes. He tastes like old milk and sourdough bread. He says they should get a dog and talks about the dog he had when he was nine, on and on in a ft tone, until his words fade into the sound of the street traffic.

  She says a hotel room is no pce for a dog.

  Two days ter he’s gone when she wakes up, along with half his stuff, mostly his vinyls and guitars. The mandolin remains, and the googly eyes on its body stare at her as she assesses the situation with all the mindless camity of an animatronic.

  She has enough money to pay for the next week but she pretends she doesn’t so she can leave everything behind, then she never hears from him again. Someone trades her a 9mm for the baggie of coke she just bought and she goes south and tries to shoot the branches off of trees in an orchard, all arranged in an endless grid so if she stands in the right spot it’s like an infinity mirror where she, alone, is not reflected. She is trading hells like high-risk stocks. A life of instance and happenstance. She is terrified of being found, of being known, although the brain damage or the trauma—who can say the difference—prevents her from being aware of who or what she is terrified of.

  The path of sudden departures stalls in Fremont where she ends up living with a serial killer who deals crystal meth and lets her crash on the couch and smoke ungodly amounts of hash in exchange for answering the phone and the door. He’s friendly to her and he doesn’t kill women. She’s gd that he never makes any effort to fuck her. He limps when it rains, a bullet fragment caught in his calf from Iraq, an accidental discharge from his CO’s rifle during a routine gate check. On his other leg is a tattoo of an Arabic word. He doesn’t know what it says but he saw a man he shot write it in his own blood before dying. When he’s high he buys ramen and soon the apartment is full of it, carefully organized by expiration date. He expins that the Big One is coming and he wants to have enough food. He never touches it and one day he accuses her of eating some and kicks her out. She’s seen him beat a man unconscious with his fists and elbows but he never ys a finger on her even when he’s furiously shouting at her to leave, which is more than she can say for the hipster who cries at beauty.

  While she’s looking for somewhere to live the cops question her a few times and offer a hotel room in exchange for information but she says nothing and after a few weeks they stop harassing her. Nothing ever comes of it. She gets a retail job and works for four months then stops showing up. Who knows where she got so good at saying goodbye? Contexts stick to her then fly off like the rain on the windshield. One day in San Jose she sees a bald middle-aged man in a gray suit watching her from across the street and something clicks inside her head like a big industrial switch. She walks across the busy street, walks right up to him.

  “What am I supposed to do now?!” she screams, words tumbling from an unknown engine inside her.

  “Why would I know?” he says. “It’s all fucked. I don’t want to be a part of what’s coming. Kill yourself, shoot up, go become a fucking movie star if there will still be movies. What do you want to hear, do this and that, make something better or worse, have a daily purpose? Make one up. That’s all that ever was.”

  “Fuck you man,” she says, “You coward.”

  “Go fuck yourself. This is the post-endgame. Who won or lost doesn’t matter. I didn’t want to see you here.”

  When he walks away she feels dizzy and the world spins for a moment and she doesn’t know why she said any of those things or why he did. She doesn’t remember what she recognizes him from. Some part of her is furious but she doesn’t know why. And she’s scared, but she’s often scared. The impression of him sticks in her, reminding her how much she doesn’t remember. Bits of childhood, teenage years, a punk house in the bay. She’s tense and she dreams of his face.

  She starts attending free yoga csses in the park. While meditating she imagines a perfect obsidian sphere reflecting all things. The past emerges in the reflection, drifting toward her, floating in from the sky in neat grid arrangements. She remembers being in a board room with the bald man under rows of harsh fluorescent lights, leaning attentively forward with a practiced posture. Her gss of water rests on a coaster.

  “This builds the future,” he is saying. Something to try to envision in her mind. “Empty nd becomes families. Not just humans, families, perfectly symmetrical. The nature of ideal infrastructure is to perfect itself, to create ideal retions. To aggregate monads into functional components. This isn’t about Bck or White, gay or straight, Jew or Christian. This is about absolute futurity.”

  More of his theoretical eborations. It should be boring, but the words stick in her mind. He will ask her to recall his thoughts. He’s not just seeking positions of power, he’s trying to make her a tool of his advancement. He loves to hear himself talk, and it’s the only way she’ll get a clue what his pns for her are. Or what her next task will be. The future, looming over both of them. Absolute futurity. He intends to wrangle it down, to figure out how to make it fit into his precise schemes. She is an attractive, young, white, American woman who can pass as a biological female more often than not. She intends to survive the future with a minimum amount of personal suffering.

  The obsidian sphere rotates and the reflection spins until she remembers a staircase painted white, carpeted with white carpet, in an empty house, the smell of whiskey on his breath, her back pressing into the staircase, his fingers awkwardly exploring between her legs. A staircase between two empty, unfurnished rooms. Not even the electricity works here.

  “I think it’s too soon,” she’s saying. “It’s not healed yet.”

  “It’ll be fine,” he’s saying, “It’ll be fine.” Repeating it like a spell as he fumbles with his belt and the zipper of his scks. Whiskey, tonight. He’s better when it’s tequi. He’s had a rough day. She’s expected to be here for that. Trying to rex her hips, to convince her muscles to do the right thing. The body always struggles to meet the demands of the role.

  If only he didn’t want these things, if they could just have a quiet night. Alone, apart.

  She stares at the fresh white paint on the ceiling. Paint so fresh it’s still offgassing votile organic compounds. She can smell it, can feel it, that white pstic smell inside her lungs, entering her, filling, harming. The gentle sounds of a gong return her to the park as the group meditation ends.

  The sphere fades behind a thick fog. Every week she attends meditation, and as she rexes her shoulders and straightens out her spine bits and pieces of various pasts rise to the surface, stare at her from just beneath it, then return to the depths. Little clues buried in the parts of her that ache. An esoteric library lurking in her joints and gnds. She has no tools to correte these moments into a narrative. They could be called fshbacks, except that they dominate everything. No, it’s the present that emerges in fshes, hollow, leaving her with an identity only in the sense of the past self she no longer is. She doesn’t know that person anymore. Lilly, in the collective house with a bunch of radicals and punks, sharing community. All those people, where are they now?

  Why is she alone?

  “Identity is not an active agent, it is a consequence. You are a consequence of your environment. If you are lucky, if you are successful, you will be chosen in turn to create the environment. You will be selected, by the environment, so that it can perpetuate itself. In this way you can reproduce, your identity reproduces, through the recreation of the perfect environment. This is the purpose of real estate. This is why we are here, you understand. Without the perfect environment of real estate, we would not be able to exist. The legacy would vanish and all would be lost.”

  Her vagina and her hips are still sore, but she’s taking in the information as well as she can, which isn’t well. The bruises from the staircase still mark the flesh over her spine. There have been errors tely, accumuting bit by bit, and if she’s noticed them then so have others. Still, she has been chosen for this difficult task: to pass on the consequences, to reproduce them. The two women standing in front of her, naturally born women in slightly outdated business suits, are merely representatives, preparing her for her further duties. Responsibilities.

  “You might be thinking this sounds somewhat like a pyramid scheme. Everything functions in this way. Life itself is a pyramid scheme, only the result of those who come ter passing on the ways of those who came before. All of this is perfectly preserved, and will remain perfectly preserved.”

  “In memory?” she asks.

  Somewhere nearby he is waiting, listening. He has taken a personal interest in her career, in her role in the organization. He likes the dependency.

  “Absolutely not,” says the woman. “Memory is a failure. What has come before is preserved in property rights and architecture. These are the forces that shape identity. All else is smoke and mirrors. I don’t tell you these things because I expect you to remember it. One day you will forget all of this. I tell you these things because that is how one builds a better house.”

  One day you will forget all of this.

  One day you will forget all of this.

  I won’t, she thinks.

  But I did, she thinks, years ter.

  But I remembered. I remembered.

  The sphere turns, rotating smoothly through some mechanism of its own. A child in the pews, lost to the world. Wandering the sidewalk. The orb is dark, the orb is chrome. Memory, a glitch in the future.

  Reflecting the colors of the desert as she watches the sun setting, the sky fading from pale blue to the deepest indigo, the light of pnets emerging overhead. Somehow there are two of her, one sitting on a cooler drinking watered down Triple Sec, the other emptying a gas can into the tank of the Jeep.

  “We should leave tonight, in the dark. Drive all night, get far away from here.”

  “I’m tired. That’s why I was sloppy.”

  “It’s okay. I doubt he’ll report it.” Stolen gas, siphoned from a pickup while the other one pretended to be drunk to distract the driver. It was easier since they figured out the self-starting siphon trick, the taste of gasoline fumes no longer poisoning the sinuses. Hydrocarbon soup, the special perfume of a combustion nation. But she was too loud and the distraction wasn’t enough so they had to pull knives on him, threaten to report him for soliciting sex, and vanish as well as they could. Survival isn’t as fun as it used to be. He seemed sufficiently distressed but they don’t want to be in this county tomorrow, just in case. Some men behave more from wounded pride than sense. This is something the two of them have learned the hard way.

  The st sliver of sun disappears. When she closes her eyes she can see the light of nine pnets swirling around her, dark orbs against an expanse of emptiness.

  Fading away, resolving into the smell of sweat.

  “I’m going to do this for you. Because I believe in you,” says a cis woman with deep blue hair, iridescent like peacock feathers. Her eyes are wide, pupils dited into caverns.

  The girl is hungry, crouched down on the balls of her dirty bare feet on the king-size mattress taking up most the floor of this oddly-shaped room. Every time the cis woman moves the springy mattress wobbles beneath both of them, bouncing waves of uncertainty. She’s doing what she can to trust the blue-haired woman because what else is she supposed to do? Because she knows they are linked. But ever since she took a hit of the pipe, weed and mugwort and pedicuris and something undisclosed she’s hoping isn’t datura, the world has started to feel fuzzy again and so has she. No clear memory of why they’re in this pced, an ornamental room with arched ceilings and seashells embedded in the walls, smelling of dabs and eucalyptus and lit by a few piles of string lights in the corners. All she knows is that she needs to be here, that Felicity is here too, that this is a familiar pce if not exactly a friendly one. And the woman in front of her, whose name she can’t remember: this woman is familiar. They’ve slept together.

  The oceanic mattress rocks beneath her as the blue-haired woman finishes using a tattoo needle, a 9-point shader, pressed too hard into her own abdomen to create nine bloody spots arranged in a grid.

  “This is called a magic square,” she says. She touches a finger to the central dot and then paints her lips red with it. The blood runs down from that spot, collects in her bellybutton.

  “This is alchemy of the body. Using this, we’re going to find the things that we’ve lost,” she says, tossing the used needle into the space between the mattress and the wall. She moves closer to the girl. “Kiss me,” she says, “so we can create the doorway.”

  The sphere again: a memory from the yoga meditations. Is it something inside her, or something that she contacts? Or just a representation of something her mind can’t make sense of? Multiple orbs, multiple spheres, signifying what? It’s oblong now, ovoid, murky, bruised, purples and dark browns, a saturated storm. And something winding around it, crawling on its surface, a bck and red thing, a tapeworm or a centipede.

  “You aren’t here yet,” says a voice, her voice, drowning in the mist. “No one goes here. Go back. Go back!”

  Winding around.

  She is sitting in the backyard of a collective house watching dybugs fucking on a shovel handle. A cloud of cigarette smoke rolls past her and the girl continues talking. Scatter, that’s her name. She drinks her morning coffee and starts ranting about capitalism.

  “So like, in this era houses are not first and foremost homes, they are battlements for the advancement of a long-dead society. Right now we can get into these empty houses, but in ten or twenty years they’ll all have security cameras on the inside and outside hooked up to the internet, monitoring every use of electricity or water. In thirty years they’ll all have robot drones programmed to attack unless the right keycode is entered and the right eyeball is scanned. Everywhere this disease spreads, using capital and human flesh as the substrate on which to grow, stretching out fiments of asphalt and ying down a pque of concrete, repurposing dead trees and gypsum and copper, coating it in a residue of tex.”

  Latex paint. Lilly has a vague sense of a tension and a soreness in her pelvic region, though she cannot remember why. Something she’s not supposed to remember.

  Another empty house again, again. They rely on these houses, abandoned by property developers and investment companies and absentee ndlords. People like them are not supposed to exist. They are supposed to end up on the street, die of the frost, of diseases, of starvation, of murder or suicide, or end up institutionalized then in jail then in prison then dead of frost, of disease, of starvation, of murder or suicide. The American system of livelihood is based on inherited wealth and those too weird through reason of mental and sexual oddity, those too emotionally unstable, too traumatized and scarred and wounded, to be of any use to the families they come from fall into the hands of each other, the scraps they’ve managed to pull together. It’s not a safety net, just a way to soften the blow, techniques passed down, communal networks. Being its own sort of family, it is harmful and coercive in its own ways, but this community of squatters and anarchists, street kids and house punks, travelers and townies, they have built up a way to keep each other alive, a shadow society living in the gaps of the world that just wants to read their legal name for the st time in an amiably brief obituary.

  Many of these people would be dead without these networks of support and the ways of utilizing space avaible to them. Perhaps in the future they will be. For now, in the early winter of 2008, they have a way to survive.

  Scatter is speaking to someone else, to Arsenal, in bck overalls with the face tattoos, “These pces, these houses, discipline the forms-of-life possible within the zones they territorialize. Even squatters, as much as we attempt to detourn these private psycholibidinal factories into possibilities of public space, turning the apparatus of property into a reservoir of lines-of-flight, find our pathways constricted into the desiring-machines of capital. We become the ghosts of consumers, the rhizomatic potentials of our becoming-barbarian sequestered into a frail grasping at domesticity!” With this Scatter swings the sledgehammer, and drywall flies into the air.

  Arsenal ughs. “Then that just leaves us squeezed between bare life and the jouissance of rebelling against it.”

  Scatter frowns. “You’re right, but I don’t want to fetishize rupture too much.”

  “Why? Isn’t that the point of writing, to help assign these libidinal attachments?”

  “I’m afraid of encouraging martyrs. It’s a fw of mine, I guess, that I can’t help thinking about the longterm effects. I still want to win.” Scatter is so starry-eyed, covered in drywall dust.

  “This too is a form of territorialization.”

  The conceptual eborations form a constant background, a running commentary on their actions. It gives them tools to understand their lives. Though most of them aren’t college educated, they’re very well-read, thirsty for knowledge, because they’re desperate for anything that will give them the upper hand on understanding and surviving the nightmarish situation they’ve been thrown into. The manic bric-a-brac philosophy is a work of love.

  Lilly’s too tired to contribute. Sleep has been increasingly difficult in recent weeks and her retionship with it has grown difficult too. And unhealthy. She’s gone from craving it to resenting it, as if it were something other people were holding over her. The alternative is lying in bed, twitching with the built up trauma in her muscles. There’s no space to do something like reading or masturbating with everyone else occupying some corner of every room (although that hasn’t stopped others from doing both). In a way it’s comforting, a contradiction of the isotion she has experienced so often in life. There are moments, such as when she’s trying to occupy the te hours of the night, when it’s utterly grueling. Still, the days keep her busy. They’ve been opening squats all over town. A number of encampments just got cleared out and a lot of people need a safer pce to stay then where they’re spending the nights now. She’s perfected little skills. Some of them she already knew—lockpicking, for instance, she still remembers learning the basics of that with Darren, before the story of her life was bnked out and repced with something hostile and capable of covering its tracks.

  For a few weeks she attempted gardening as something to ground her, but it requires a consistency of focus that she cks. Her mind in too many pces at once, the pnts inevitably died. She’s had to settle for sprinkling seeds occasionally into the pces in the backyard that seem most fertile. Arsenal suggested she try something simir with public space, showed her how to mix seeds and cy into a little ball that could be casually dropped or thrown with hostility into the barren ndscaping of the city.

  She’s perfected her walk, the walk of the fneur, the disinterested architectural critic secretly carrying boltcutters. She wanders through these cities, Oaknd, Emeryville, Portnd, Eugene, Seattle, Berkeley, Sacramento, like a lost piece of paper on a gusty autumn day, but in her head she builds the image of the grid, she understands what pces are ignored, she sees where the police frequent, sees where homes lie unattended. She is developing the habits and skills for decoding the structure behind the surface of the city. The city escates. Old spaces are locked up and torn down, new buildings are constructed. Graffiti disappears beneath beige paint. A friend disappears into the back of a patrol car. New walls sprout cameras. More and more she is seeing a new type of person, the secret yuppie, in a white v-neck t-shirt and bluejeans, rich people who listen to corporate rap and punk and keep an eye on the pces previous generations overlooked, all the more ready to call the cops. Security guards growing in number. It feels as if slowly forces are churning, rising to meet each other, waiting for a catastrophe to send them colliding together.

  The gong again, and the obsidian sphere retreats, but before it does she catches a glimpse of something else: entering an abandoned house with the key provided by the property manager, two men in gray suits with her, she in a rose-colored blouse and a bck skirt, and there’s a sound from behind the wall. Bigger than a cat, bigger than a raccoon. One of the suited men opens the crawlspace suddenly and there is a kid, no more than sixteen years old, with a backpack, a dirty face, greasy hair, a terrified look, and then all the muscles in their face contort into a demonic expression of suffering as they go still and colpse to the buzzing of the taser, falling out of the light of the fshlight. She should want to scream but instead she nods.

  The park filled with older white women in skintight activewear wavers like the image on a fg fluttering in the breeze. Freshly mowed grass. Crackling thunder through her mind.

  ***

  It’s 2016 and she’s sitting in a softly-lit room full of other trans women, most of them younger by a few years, gathered around an old CRT television connected to a ptop. Someone is pying A Perfect Circle music videos: a pale woman with a hole in her stomach crawling through a forest. There are half-eaten packs of yogurt and a few Steel Reserves spread across the floor alongside the various pillows and cushions that had been salvaged from roadsides.

  “What do you want to talk about?” asks a woman in pink pajamas near the television.

  “What?” she repeats. “Wait? What was I just saying?”

  “You said you had something important you need to tell people about. That something was happening or was going to happen?”

  “Where am I? It’s 2016, right?”

  A feeling of panic surging up. Too te, too te. She needed to warn someone. Empty fields. Insects crawling in the soil. Death.

  “You’re in Richmond, at the house. Remember?”

  “Richmond, Virginia?”

  “California. East bay.”

  “Right.” She doesn’t really remember the house but she can locate the setting, north of Oaknd, across the water from San Francisco. Suburbs, railyards, oil. She keeps coming back to this pce, the birthpce of the internet.

  The other girls share knowing looks, checking in with each other silently. She knows these looks. Someone is having a psychotic episode again. It’s her. She’s having a dissociative fugue. Right now.

  “Where did you think you were? Virginia?”

  “I was at one… no, I thought it was 2008, I think. It’s 2016?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something bad is going to happen. I can’t remember what.”

  The woman takes a step closer to her. A soft, freckled face, curly red hair. “That sounds like anxiety talking.”

  “Is that who I am? Anxiety?”

  “I don’t know. Can you tell me who I’m talking to right now?”

  “Can you?”

  The phone is vibrating. The phone is ringing, chimes, loud chimes. The ceiling fan is spinning, spinning in a circle. The flies move around the room under the fan in seemingly random patterns. Fneurs, wandering paths. Deconstructing the psychogeography of the linear city. She can almost see the flicker of the LED lights. Who? The TV is off. There are only two girls in front of her, casually holding each other around the waist, giggling at something on the phone screen. Their toenails, painted bck and purple, are intertwined. In the distance someone is pying an acoustic guitar and humming along the words to a Bright Eyes song. ‘Nothing in the past or future ever will feel like today!’ The refrigerator is loud. There is a pne passing by overhead.

  It’s night. She is still sitting on the floor, on a cushion. One of her legs fell asleep. The redheaded girl is sitting nearby reading a Shadowrun rulebook and drinking tea. Behind her, muffled by a thin wall, she can hear the two girls calling out in pleasure, fucking, smming the bedframe against the wall, screaming in bliss. She has an image of those toenails, purple and bck, intertwined. Something is stirring inside her. She checks her phone. 12:28.

  “Do I smoke cigarettes?”

  The girl looks up from her book, concern on her face. “You shouldn’t. How are you doing?”

  Shouldn’t. That’s a yes.

  She begins to get up but the electric tingling in her waking leg is defeating her. “How long was I sitting there?”

  “A long time. People were pretty worried.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m going a little crazy. Sorry, I shouldn’t say crazy, that’s a slur.”

  “It’s okay coming from you. You’re not exactly neurotypical.” God, the concern in her voice is so much. So involved with another person’s state of wellbeing.

  “Yeah, okay.” She finds what she’s looking for in a back pocket. She remembers you can’t smoke on the patio, have to go outside to the sidewalk. Can’t remember her own name but can remember everything about cigarettes, ain’t that a bitch. Her legs carry her this time and she’s out the door, the other girl in tow behind. That girl’s name is something biblical, Eve or Lilith or Seraph or whatever. A lighter changes hands, two cigarettes are lit.

  “You know, you’ve been dealing with a lot tely,” the girl says.

  “Yeah,” she says in an inviting tone, trying to glean information. Some fear inside her instructs her not to reveal the depths of her amnesia. Too much vulnerability.

  “Do you have a therapist yet?”

  “Uh, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it seems like you need some help with something you’re dealing with. Drinking all the time isn’t really a solution. From my perspective, just as an outsider experiencing my own reality, it seems like your difficulties are getting worse.”

  “I don’t remember things so well,” she admits.

  “You’ve been saying that. Have you had memory issues for a long time or just recently?”

  How would I know? “I think a long time, but they’ve been getting worse.”

  “Looks to me that after that st robo trip you’ve had a lot to process.”

  “I don’t remember about that.”

  “Do you want me to tell you? It might be triggering.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were talking a bunch about gangstalking and mind control. You kept saying something like, that everyone is part of a conspiracy. Like, everyone in the world.”

  “Hey Sophia, can I hit that?” asks a girl coming out of the house. One of the ones who had been making out earlier. She brazenly steps down to the sidewalk in only red panties, a tight bck crop top, and a pleather harness, dripping in sweat. There’s still cum in her hair and her boner is visible. That stirs up feelings, something deep in the pain in her hip, but she’s used to ignoring it.

  “Sure,” says Sophia, passing the cigarette.

  “Oh, hey Ivy, you’re back.”

  Sophia shakes her head, and the newly arrived girl picks up right away.

  “Oh, you’re not Ivy. Hi, I’m Eff, like the letter. What’s your name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what would you like people to call you?”

  A pause. Almost challenging. She stares into a vast sea of death from far beneath it and pulls out the first thing she can name.

  “Empty. Call me Empty.”

  Later, she’s washing dishes in the common kitchen. There’s a certain familiarity in domesticity. Rendering care, fingers sliding over ceramic, grasping stainless steel cutlery. Knives.

  She turns. Sophia and Eff are there, Eff is wearing a dress and radiating warmth having just gotten out of the shower.

  “I feel like I’m having a memory in reverse,” Empty says.

  “How so?” asks Eff.

  “Like I’m in the past remembering the future right now. And this is the memory. The memory the past is having.”

  “Why would that be happening?”

  “I was part of an experiment,” Empty says. “Or maybe the whole Earth was, all at once.”

  “What was that experiment?” asks Eff.

  “The housing market,” she says.

  Sophia ughs a little, bitterly, and murmurs, “Well, you’re not wrong.”

  “We’re in a house,” Empty says.

  “That’s about the shape of the problem, yeah,” says a crust punk rolling into the room. Empty remembers their name, it’s Nylon. “Sorry to interrupt, hey Eff you got a lighter? Also, Emiko has bumps of K for both of y’all if you want.” Sophia shakes her head. “What about you, Ivy?”

  “This is Empty, not Ivy,” says Eff. “And she probably shouldn’t do anything right now until she’s a little more settled.”

  “My bad, my bad, hey Iv—uh, Empty, why don’t you give that pte a rest, it’s pretty fucking clean by now, come out front with the other girls and hit a bowl or two? It’s that fuckin purple blue whatever shit, smells like a goddamn citrus orchard, y’know?”

  Empty follows Nylon out to the front of the house. There’s three other girls there, she recognizes them from earlier in the living room, and has a familiarity with them, she’s been living with them for a minute now.

  “Hey there, Empty,” says one of them. Ursu, just recently moved in. Straight blond hair, Hello Kitty shirt.

  “Hi,” she says. “I still don’t remember very much.”

  “No worries,” says Nylon as they pack the bowl with expert speed. “You’re doing your goddamn best.”

  They smoke in near silence, the only sounds the clicking of the lighter, swish of air, coughing. One of them puts on some quiet vaporwave and as the weed hits Empty zones out staring at the one yellow sodium light amid the bright white lights in the parking lot down the street. Cars pass by anonymously. The sky almost looks as though its considering summer showers, thick and damp as it reflects back the city light. The other girls are talking about something. The war in Syria. Someone who was someone’s boyfriend is pnning to go to Rojava to fight for liberation. But she’s worried it’s a suicide attempt.

  “All of life is a suicide attempt,” says Nylon. “That’s all being alive is. You jump onto the great wheel so you can spin around it one time and get off.”

  “I don’t fucking buy that for a second,” says the girl next to them, but she doesn’t eborate.

  “What do you think makes a person what they are?” asks Empty. “What makes identity? Environment?”

  “Everything and nothing,” says Nylon. “You are the product of your environment and at the same time your environment will never produce another person like you.”

  “Do I ever talk about my parents?” asks Empty.

  “You mean like, does Ivy? I haven’t met you before,” says the girl next to Nylon.

  “Yeah, does Ivy talk about this body’s parents?”

  “Not very much. Sometimes about the aunt. I guess like, shitty religious parents. But mostly about your friend Darren.”

  “What happened to Darren?”

  “He died.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ivy only found out recently. Y’all had lost contact.”

  “Oh. That’s really upsetting.”

  “Yes it is.”

  She’s crying, silently, two little streams of saltwater running down her face.

  “I want to heal, but I don’t know how to do that,” she says. “I don’t even know what’s wrong with me.” She pulls out a cigarette and lights it. “I barely feel like a person. I hate myself and I don’t know why. Every day I just want to fucking run into traffic. I want to end it. I’m so sick of the suffering, the pain, the fucking confusion, I just want to fucking die! I want to die! I’m so goddamn sick of it all.” Ivy finishes the cigarette and puts it out. She feels exhausted and slumps to the ground. “Fuck,” she says. “What the fuck just happened? Was I high?”

  “I don’t think so,” says Jaime, lighting her own cigarette and passing one to Nylon. “Someone else was fronting.”

  “Yeah, no, I remember all that,” says Ivy. “I remember Empty, even if she didn’t remember me. What the fuck, my head feels like its been turned inside out.”

  “Yeah I imagine so,” says Nylon. “Trauma will do that for you.”

  Something like an ice sculpture shattering in her mind.

  She’s sitting in a park in the middle of the day. Freshly mowed grass, the sound of cars. The yoga instructor is packing up, looking at her with some concern, but it’s not uncommon for one or two students to continue meditating there. It’s just that she’s been twitching in distress for a few minutes.

  She gets up thinking, Ivy, yeah, that’s a good name, I can start going by that. She hasn’t had a real name in a long minute.